Here is a new concept art for the highly anticipated Wasteland 2 (which was funded mostly by Kickstarter)

Robo-scorpion anyone?

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Also, Valve explained the job opening we spoke about yesterday in a blog post this morning. MAbrash went on to explain:

So what has my personal experience been?

As I said earlier, I knew little about how Valve worked when I started here, and my introduction to the company was not at all what I thought it would be. What I expected was that I’d be handed a substantial chunk of technical work to do – something like visibility determination in the Source engine, or fog of war calculation in DotA 2 (which I did in fact work on, but as a sideline – that was a fun bit of optimization that I’ll write about one of these days).

What I got instead was a few suggestions about areas people thought I might find it interesting to look at, and no direct guidance at all. The closest anyone came to giving me direction was when most of the Source engine team was working on Portal 2 optimization; I’ve done a lot of optimization, so I suggested to Jay Stelly that maybe I should work on Portal 2 as well. Jay said, “Yeah, you could do that, but we’ll get it shipped anyway.” After a couple of discussions like that, I realized that he was saying was that I should think about whether that was really the most valuable thing I could be doing – there were plenty of people who were skilled at optimizing the Source engine already working on Portal 2, so it would be more useful to think about what high-impact things I could do that no one else was doing. That, and conversations with various people around the company, kicked me into a different mode of thought, which eventually led me to a surprising place: wearable computing.

By “wearable computing” I mean mobile computing where both computer-generated graphics and the real world are seamlessly overlaid in your view; there is no separate display that you hold in your hands (think Terminator vision). The underlying trend as we’ve gone from desktops through laptops and notebooks to tablets is one of having computing available in more places, more of the time. The logical endpoint is computing everywhere, all the time – that is, wearable computing – and I have no doubt that 20 years from now that will be standard, probably through glasses or contacts, but for all I know through some kind of more direct neural connection. And I’m pretty confident that platform shift will happen a lot sooner than 20 years – almost certainly within 10, but quite likely as little as 3-5, because the key areas – input, processing/power/size, and output – that need to evolve to enable wearable computing are shaping up nicely, although there’s a lot still to be figured out.

So despite shooting down the rumors of a ‘STEAM BOX’, it looks like Valve certainly is looking for a hardware engineer.
As read here in a interview with Penny Arcade, Gabe Newell said:

“Well, if we have to sell hardware we will. We have no reason to believe we’re any good at it, it’s more we think that we need to continue to have innovation and if the only way to get these kind of projects started is by us going and developing and selling the hardware directly then that’s what we’ll do. It’s definitely not the first thought that crosses our mind; we’d rather hardware people that are good at manufacturing and distributing hardware do that. We think it’s important enough that if that’s what we end up having to do then that’s what we end up having to do.”

I suppose we’ll need to wait and see what happens. I love me some speculation!